Ruthless Russian, Lost Innocence

He shrugged and stepped into the room. ‘Twenty minutes or so.’ His brilliant blue gaze skimmed over her tee shirt and faded jeans, and moved up to her hair, falling in a curtain of pale gold silk around her shoulders. This was the Ella Stafford the world did not see. Over the past few years she had been expertly marketed as a violin virtuoso; much had been made of her aristocratic pedigree, and she was portrayed on the covers of her numerous CD albums as a sophisticated artiste. The woman staring at him across the grand piano looked younger than her public image, and her intense awareness of him that flared, undisguised, in her stormy grey eyes made her seem painfully vulnerable.

A kinder man would not take his pursuit of her any further, Vadim knew. Beneath her ice-cool image he sensed an emotional fragility that warned him not to get involved. He liked his affairs to be uncomplicated, and he ensured that the women he bedded always knew the score: mutually satisfying sex with no strings attached. Ella seemed curiously innocent, although in reality that was unlikely for a modern and successful woman in her mid-twenties, he reminded himself. Seeing her like this, in jeans that moulded her slender hips like a second skin, her face bare of make-up and her hair falling loose to halfway down her back, only intensified his desire for her.

The sexual chemistry between them was white-hot, and kindness was not an attribute he possessed—he had learned that of himself many years ago, Vadim acknowledged grimly. He was hard; undoubtedly he was selfish, and he took what he wanted without compunction or compassion. He would take Ella because he found her pale, elfin beauty irresistible, but he would accept no responsibility for her emotions once he had slaked his hunger to possess her body.

‘I had no idea you could play the piano with the same skill with which you play the violin.’